The Securities and Exchange Commission

For the first 140 years that stocks were traded, there was no real federal regulation in effect. That changed with the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the subsequent depression in the 1930s. Congress passed two laws, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, to help protect consumers, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created in 1934 to supervise these two laws. Fundamentally, the SEC is charged with interpreting federal securities laws, amending existing rules, proposing new rules to address changing market conditions, and enforcing rules and laws. Since then, the SEC has lived through many cycles in the market, and in the early years of the 21st century, the SEC has been occupied with managing corporate wrongdoing, excessive exchanges of variable annuities, and mutual trading practices.